Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico: Keys to the "New Science" brings together in one volume translations, commentaries, and essays that illuminate the background of Giambattista Vico's major work. Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene have collected a series of texts that help us to understand the progress of Vico's thinking, culminating in the definitive version of the New Science, which was published in 1744.

Bayer and Verene provide useful introductions both to the collection as a whole and to the individual writings. What emerges is a clear picture of the decades-long process through which Vico elaborated his revolutionary theory of history and culture. Of particular interest are the first sketch of the new science from his earlier work, the Universal Law, and Vico's response to the false book notice regarding the first version of his New Science.

The volume also includes additions to the 1744 edition that Vico had written out but that do not appear in the English translations-including his brief chapter on the "Reprehension of the Metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke"-and a bibliography of all of Vico's writings that have appeared in English. Giambattista Vico: Keys to the "New Science" is a unique and vital companion for anyone reading or rereading this landmark of Western intellectual history.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

All translations, commentaries, and essays are reprinted, revised,
and edited from these issues of New Vico Studies, published by the
Philosophy Documentation Center for the Institute for Vico Studies.
The illustrations are reproduced from historical editions of
Vico’s works. ...

Abbreviations

Introduction: Interpreting the New Science

Giambattista Vico’s New Science was published in two versions,
one in 1725 and another in 1730. In his Autobiography Vico refers
to these as the First New Science and the Second New Science (A 192).
Prior to the First New Science Vico published his three books of
Universal Law (1720 –22). ...

Part 1. Background of the New Science in the Universal Law (1720 –1722)

Synopsis of Universal Law

In the 1720s, prior to the first version of his New Science (1725),
Vico published three volumes in Latin grouped under the general
Italian title Il diritto universale. To announce this work, Vico
had printed four densely written pages in Italian that are untitled
but are commonly called Sinopsi del diritto universale. ...

The True and the Certain: From On the One Principle and One End of Universal Law

The philosophical problem that Giambattista Vico finds in the
law is the relationship of the true (verum) and the certain (certum)—that is, the connection that exists in the law between the law as rational
and universally valid and the law as positive, historical (the
product of human will deriving validity from authority as present
in particular societies). ...

A New Science Is Essayed: From On the Constancy of the Jurisprudent

The second book of Giambattista Vico’s Universal Law, On the Constancy of the Jurisprudent, is divided into two major parts. The
first is “On the Constancy of Philosophy,” and the second is “On
the Constancy of Philology.” Vico begins this second part with a
sketch of a “new science” that will be based on a reconception of
philology. ...

On Homer and His Two Poems: From the Dissertations

The third book of Vico’s Universal Law contains, in addition to
notes on the first two books, a series of short Dissertations. In his
Autobiography Vico says he “read both the poems of Homer in the
light of his principles of philology”; and by certain canons of mythology
that he had conceived, ...

Vico’s Address to His Readers from a Lost Manuscript on Jurisprudence

In the Villarosa collection of Giambattista Vico’s manuscripts in
the National Library in Naples there is an autograph of two sheets
of paper, written on three sides in Latin, with the title “Ad Lectores
Aequanimos.” I have examined these pages, which are written
in Vico’s characteristically legible hand in neat lines. ...

Part 2. Reception of the First New Science (1725)

Vico’s Reply to the False Book Notice: The Vici Vindiciae

In October 1725 Giambattista Vico published in Naples what he
later in his Autobiography, called the First New Science (A 192–94).
In August 1729, four years after its publication, there appeared in
a bookstore in Naples an issue of the Leipzig Acta Eruditorum of August
1727, ...

Vindication of Vico

One of my true friends, in this current month of August
of the year 1729, informed me that among your “New Literary
Works” of the month of August of the year 1727 I and my book
are unfavorably received by you, illustrious gentlemen of letters of
Leipzig; ...

Part 3. Additions to the Second New Science (1730/1744)

Vico’s “IGNOTA LATEBAT”: On the Impresa and the Dipintura

Giambattista Vico published the first edition of his New Science
in October 1725. It has come to be known as the First New Science
(Scienza nuova prima), the term that Vico himself applied to it
in his Autobiography (A 192–94). The frontespizio, or what is commonly
known in contemporary English-language books ...

Vico’s Addition to the Tree of the Poetic Sciences and His Use of the Muses

These are the general aspects from which this science can
be regarded. Indeed, from this first principle [religion, Jove] of all
things divine and human of the gentiles, that which we have found
within this metaphysics of the human race, this sublime science
alone will give us the principles of all the other subaltern sciences ...

Vico’s Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke

Therefore, if one does not begin from—“a god who to
all men is Jove,”2—one cannot have any idea either of science or
of virtue. Thus is easily dismissed the supposition of Polybius, who
says that if there were philosophers in the world, there would be
no need of religions!3 ...

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